 Hi there, it's Sandy Allknock, and today I will be painting the ocean, a very calm serene day out at sea. This is some piece that I think we all need. And I do hope you'll try this painting. There's tons of tips included in this video all the way to the very end, so don't leave too early. This particular painting has only three colors that I'll be using in it. Cobalt blue, phthalo blue turquoise. And I'll be adding some Pains Blue-Grey as we move on. But for now I'm just going to mix these two colors into a very wet mix because I want to paint the sky first. And I like these two colors for sky. So I'll start with some pigment at the top, and this is very wet pigment, and then move into water down below that. So I get a nice soft blend. I want to do a reverse blend underneath of that. So I'm going to paint the first stroke of the ocean, then rinse the brush and bring water back in in order to get that going. And all of this needs to be about the same wetness. So don't take a brush full of like puddled water and drop it in there, or you'll end up with blooms. Make the brush about the same amount of wetness for all of these strokes. As I'm getting thicker pigment down in the bottom, I added more of the two blues to it. I've got a darker color, and it's not going to move as much. So I'm using the same color to drop into the sky to just break it up. Make it seem like there's some kind of cloud things going on there, but very muted and soft, not a whole lot going on because that paper is still soaking wet. So not puddley wet, but it's still very wet, which means all of this is going to blend nicely. If it doesn't blend perfectly, you can take that brush again with just barely dampness on it and drag it across those clouds to soften them up. You can dry it completely on a towel and then lift color out of it too. So this brush has a lot of uses for me when I do big washes like this. Next up, I'm going to break up the water section and I'm going to mix thicker pigment with some Pains Blue Gray this time. It's going to make it a little more desaturated, so it's not so cartoony bright, and I'm going to create a couple of different sections. I want some areas that will be a little darker, some that will be a little lighter, so I start getting variation in between. I'm going to add a whole lot more variation, but this just means there's some in that initial wash that's going to stay there when I get to the next phase. So I'm going to dry it completely. You want your paper dry until there's no warps in it anymore. Once you heat dry it, it should dry completely flat. And then I'm going to add water to just the ocean section, and you might wonder, well, why did I add water when I just dried it? Well, because before, different sections were different amounts of wet and dry. When I can just go in and do a clean wash with just water, I know how wet everything is, and I know all of these sections that I'm going to paint. I know exactly what they're going to do because I know how much water is there. It's not puddley, it's a little bit shiny, and that's going to give me certain kinds of edges. And water management in watercolor is huge. Just getting enough practice that you know what's going to happen when your paper is a certain amount of wetness. Look at it from different angles, so you can tell what's going to happen next time when your paper is this or that amount of wetness. So all of that got nicely blended. I want some other edges, my next level of waves that I'm putting in. I want them to be a little soft in the foreground and in that mid-range distance. I started testing to see how dry that paper is because I could tell it was starting to dry quicker than everything else. And that allowed me to take some really thick paint and do dry brush. Dry brush is when your paint is really thick on your brush. You're dancing it lightly across the surface so you get those broken edges. That ends up looking like dappled light out in that middle area. And then I went back into some of the areas that I had painted. Notice these are the darks. I'm adding more darks inside the darks. And any time I touch one of those lighter areas, I generally am finding dry paper by now or at least mostly dry paper. So I'm looking to paint into some of the really dark areas to get softer lines and then into drier areas if I want to get harder lines. Here I wanted to start to define some of these waves going up and down. I've seen people try to paint things like this and they end up with like W's across the page. That's not how waves go generally. There's sometimes places where they come up to a point when two waves crash into each other and you get a little v-shaped tip at the top, but most waves are just going to undulate softly. So don't make just a bunch of W's. Don't make them too horizontal either except in the distance. The distance is the one place. Everything's going to flatten out. Clouds, water, all of that is going to get thinner and thinner in the distance and also lighter in color. So next up I am working on trying to have one well of paint in the center that's just wetter and it's going to be lighter pigment and I'm going to use it in the distance to try to create some waves and these are of course going to be lighter and flatter as they move out far away and I'll throw some water across it just to soften all of that because you can see how that just looks like mist in the distance. Now as I start moving again into the painting and start finding the paper is just drier and drier and drier I can start making the wave shadows and the wave shapes with harder edges and this is where knowing your brushes well and learning how to manipulate your brushes to get multiple strokes out of them becomes important because the rest of the painting that's underneath you can go over top of one of those edges if one of those waves came out looking funky. You can totally go over that at this point with darker paint and fix any of that and that's a little bit of what I'll be doing but a lot of it is going to be in being able to get your brush to make a thin point on one end of a stroke and then meld into a thicker center to the stroke and then going back into a thin end. It's going to give you more elegant strokes in your painting it's going to give you a little more detail from the same brush so you don't have to switch all of a sudden from this nice big hunk in number 10 and switch to a number 4 in order to get the trailing edge of that same stroke because when you do that you're reloading another brush with the pigment using more paint maybe that will convince some of you to just use your big brushes and learn how to lighten up your touch so that you can end up with very soft you know kind of fluted edges on the edges of the strokes like this. Just this kind of painting is such good practice go to Google and find some waves and start to really study what their shapes look like and see if you can get your brush to make strokes that go from thin to thick and that's going to make a huge difference. Pick out a few waves like that wave on the left that I had just finished where you can make some almost parallel shadows coming down one side of the wave it's going to give your painting a little more sense of having painted an actual wave instead of just blobbing on color because now I'm trying to guide the motion of the ocean I'm trying to show where the ocean is lifting up on the backside of that wave it's really light and on the front side of that wave the shadows coming down and all of the waves around it are supporting that motion so you can almost feel the wave curling up just a little bit there's some sections where you may also find that it looks like you have a strip across the painting like there's somehow all of your waves joined and ended up making one bright spot that just travels completely across and I'm constantly squinting at my painting to see if that's happened by accident somewhere and then breaking that up just taking another dark stroke and crisscrossing some of those areas so that I end up with something that has a really good flow to it I'm going to go back into this distant section once again and try to raise up the level of the horizon back there it's not until I get to the far far distant waves that I'm using this really small brush it's number four round and I'm using it because these are really small waves out there I'm also using much thinner pigment much more water remember everything's going to dry 30% lighter than what you painted so if you paint something a little too dark know that it's going to lighten up some and here I've got edges that are as sharp as some of the ones in the foreground so I'm just going to take a very little bit of water on my flat brush and just go right over the surface again and soften out some of that so I don't end up with hard edges out there where I wouldn't be able to see them as Bob Ross used to say put a bird on it or here I'm going to put a bunch of birds on it different angles, different sizes and using a very pale wash of that desaturated kind of color if you have not yet then please do tap that like button and if you haven't subscribed do that as well and hit the bell and tell YouTube you want to see all my videos so you can come back and see more I'm going to have more watercolor painting of water on Friday all week on socials I will be painting water so please do join me there my patrons got a little treat they got to see a bit of a crazy thing I did and it's a don't do this at home the drawing on the left is in Copic Marker I tried to replicate what I've got here that I showed you today and it's a do not do this at home if you're interested in seeing why don't do that at home you can become a patron and find out what I'm going to do and I will see you on Friday bye guys